Sen. Marco Rubio's campaign has spent the past six months shopping a story to news organizations that suggests my reporting has been influenced by some long-held personal grudge between Rubio and myself. It's an interesting narrative, but it's not true.

Several reporters have called this afternoon saying the Rubio camp is shopping this story again with increased intensity because of my interview with Rick Santorum. I had the temerity to ask Santorum to list one accomplishment of Rubio. He couldn't, but the campaign is trying to limit damage by suggesting there is some hidden back story. There isn't.

Since the Rubio campaign has been shopping this false tale for six months now, and since reporters always find there is nothing to the story, I thought I would save editors some time.

I have never met Rubio. Though we both come from the same state, Florida is a really big state.

We were both in Congress, but I left Washington nearly a decade before Rubio arrived. We never crossed paths politically, professionally, or socially. And I know nothing of him personally other than what I read in newspapers.

I have never once said a single thing negative about Rubio personally off the air. Not once.

There is no one in the entire state of Florida, in Washington, D.C., in New York, in the political world, the media world, or the business world that can name a time that I have ever spoken an ill word about Rubio as a person.

Why? Because I do not know him.

The same can be said of Peyton Manning. The Broncos' QB is the last guy I would want to take into the Super Bowl because he seems to underperform in big games. I've even criticized his performances through the years, but I have no opinion of him as a person because, like Rubio, I don't know him.

I'm sure Manning and Rubio are wonderful guys, but I wouldn't know. I've never met them. Even if I had, that would not impact my coverage, which has been tough on George W. Bush, John Kerry, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and just about every major candidate for national office. I even hung up on Donald Trump on live television.

Sometimes I miss the target. The biggest example of this was my take on then-Sen. Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, when I said the candidate was sold like a Coke can with a cool label that read "Hope and Change." I considered Obama's 2008 campaign to be as vacuous a major candidacy as I had ever seen. I never believed Americans would elect someone so untested to the presidency. I was wrong.

Rubio may prove me wrong as well. But if I am wrong, it is not because of some long-buried personal grudge between Rubio and myself. As I've said, I don't know him. Instead, I have questions about Rubio's ability to govern the country. And like any smart voter, I have questions about all the other candidates' abilities as well. But when I ask someone endorsing Rubio to list a single accomplishment of the Florida senator -- and that is seen as a trick question -- there may be a deeper problem with the candidate that can't be fixed by spinning false tales about a news host.

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On my long commute home at the start of this holiday weekend, I did an interview with Hugh Hewitt, who asked as he always does if I am thinking of running for president next year.

I said “No.”

Hugh then asked if I would consider running for Marco Rubio’s seat in 2016. Again, I said “no” but said if I were running for anything, it would be in Florida and that 2018 would make more sense than 2016. Hugh then said he was going to trumpet the breaking news that I was running in 2018. I laughed and said "Well, you can make that up if you want to.”

We then got on to the topics I called in to discuss. Proving that it takes very little to make news these days, several blogs began talking about a future Senate run. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple wrote and asked whether I was serious about a run.

This was my response by email:

Never given it a serious thought. I've always thought about getting back in public service one day but was just responding to 2016 question he always asks. I said no to POTUS run and 2016 Senate run and then suggested 2018 was more realistic, but that's not realistic either. I'm in a contract with NBC until 2019 and have a 6 year old and 11 year old in school very far away from Florida. Besides, I love what I am doing.

If I ever get back into public service, I suspect it is at least a decade away. And I doubt I will even then. Hugh got me talking when I was on my commute home on a Friday at the end of a long week. It's not going to happen.

Much has been written and said about Chris Christie’s fall, from being hailed as the GOP’s brightest rising star in 2013 to being dismissed in the New York Times and Washington Post as an out-of-touch has-been. Those articles, like much of the commentary on news shows like “Morning Joe,” have picked apart Governor Christie’s management style, his approach to the press, and a series of miscues that followed his massive reelection landslide just 15 months ago.

Does Chris Christie seem prickly, out-of-touch, and temperamentally overmatched by the challenges of a long-running presidential campaign? Maybe. But right now, all the chattering about the New Jersey governor’s failings means about as much as the kudos Rudy Giuliani was receiving at this point in the 2008 election cycle. The fact is you never know how a candidate and his family will respond to the rigors of a presidential campaign until they actually jump into the campaign.

“America’s Mayor” was not up to the challenges of the process required to become America’s president. And the same Bill Clinton who Sen. Bob Kerrey and many others predicted would be “opened up like a rusty can” by the glare of a presidential campaign staggered through the snows of New Hampshire in 1992 with sex scandals, draft controversies, and a slew of other challenges chasing him down to his supposed political death. He went on to be the first Democrat to get elected twice since FDR.

Despite everyone’s best guesses about Chris Christie, the fact is that you never know whether a batter can hit a curveball in the Bigs until, well, he steps into the batter’s box and takes a swing. All the missteps from Trenton to 10 Downing Street won’t mean a thing if Christie hits it out of the park in his first few New Hampshire town-hall meetings. If he does, you can bet the star-maker machinery will slowly start churning his way and we will excitedly start talking about “The Christie Comeback.”

Will it happen? Who knows? But we will all get a better clue about whether it can happen or not when the governor has to handle that first curveball aimed at his head once this long political preseason finally comes to an end.

If the past half century of GOP history is any indication, the planning for Jeb Bush’s 2016 coronation should begin at once. Republicans do not take chances on unknown first-term senators or peanut farmers from Plains. They find the most established characters in the room while taking few chances.

If you want a glimpse into just how risk averse Republicans are, consider that the GOP ticket has won the White House since 1928 only when a Nixon or Bush has been on the ticket. Also note that six of the last seven nominees for the party inherited their political fame from their fathers.

In 1988 and 1992, the GOP nominee was the son of a patriarch and U.S. senator. In 2000 and 2004, the nominee was the son of a U.S. president. In 2008, the nominee was the son of an admiral who ran the United States Navy. In 2012, the nominee was the son of a Michigan governor who also ran one of the largest car companies in the world.

This lust for legacy may be a great way to run Skull and Bones or exclusive country clubs, but it is no way to win the White House back. Maybe that is why Republicans have lost six of the last seven popular votes in presidential elections. And maybe that is why Mitt Romney urged Republicans earlier today to start looking for new leaders to move the GOP forward.

Still, the smart money in 2016 is on the son of a president, and the brother of another president, whom he helped make president when he, himself, was still the governor of Florida.

Will this South American-styled one-family-rule routine work next year? Perhaps, but at some point, the Republican Party will either find new leaders to shake up the GOP establishment or it will keep doing what it does so well in presidential years: lose.

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Democrats and Republicans are scrambling to take credit for this month's jobs report. They should save their energy.

There is some good news. America created more jobs last year than anytime since 1999, and it continues to be unaffected by weak economies in Europe and Japan. The U.S. unemployment rate also fell to 5.6 percent in December, but the .02 percent drop in unemployment was driven more by workers leaving the labor force than by new jobs. More troubling than that was the continued curse of flat wages on working-class Americans. Last month, average hourly earnings for all private-sector workers dropped, and economists expect wages to stay flat for the foreseeable future.

That continues a troubling 40-year trend.

Washington's great challenge is to move beyond the smallness that has defined politics over the past decade and get to work on improving wages that have been on the decline since 1973. American workers deserve as much — or at least a little more than having party leaders rushing to take credit for an economy that is improving but still leaving too many behind.

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I remember the warnings early in my first campaign.“You’re wasting your time, son. They don’t send Republicans to Congress around here.”

Maybe they were right. Maybe Florida’s 1st District hadn’t sent a Republican to Washington since 1873. But I couldn’t care less.

“Yep. They never will until they do,” is all I said.

And that year they did.

I learned that political lesson while following the most important political campaign of my lifetime, Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980. For weeks leading up to the election, all the smart guys were saying that Ronald Reagan was a joke, an intellectual lightweight, a political extremist, and a lousy B-list actor. There was no way a hack like that would ever be elected president. But after Americans finished voting, the network’s maps started lighting up in blue (back when GOP states were shaded that color).

Before supper was over in the Central Time Zone, the Reagan Revolution had swept across the nation in a way that shook political elites and the media establishment.“What the hell is going on?” one network commentator barked after reporting on the loss of one liberal senator after another.

What was going on was a dramatic sea change — the kind that happens not only in politics but also in business, the media, and this week, college football.

For a decade, the easiest bet in sports was putting money on a Southeastern Conference team when it played a painfully slow Big Ten power. When Alabama faced Michigan State a few years back, the outcome was obvious before the opening kickoff despite the fact the Spartans were feared across the Midwest. Earlier that year, I had gone with my family to see the Crimson Tide take on Penn State. By halftime, I pitied the plodding Nittany Lion players and the long-suffering home-field fans. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to any of them.

After all, SEC football was so dominant over the past decade that seven straight national championships were brought South by SEC teams. There was no reason to believe that Nick Saban’s team wouldn’t drag another championship trophy back to Dixie again this year. And then TCU kicked off to Ole Miss. After the Rebels got routed, it was Mississippi State’s turn to underperform. And then Auburn’s.

And then, most painfully, my Crimson Tide was beaten at the Sugar Bowl by the Big Ten’s Ohio State. It was an outcome that I couldn’t have imagined a week earlier. But by the time the Sugar Bowl kicked off, it was already obvious to most that instead of being the most fearsome conference in the land, the SEC West was instead the most overrated. Its teams were considered the best in the land—until the moment they weren’t.

And even though football is just a game, sometimes it can teach us a lesson or two. And what this year’s bowl games taught us is that the only thing that is constant in this world is change.

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There are times when symbolic gestures pack a powerful punch. Fifty-nine years ago yesterday, Rosa Parks refused to give her bus seat to a white passenger. Parks' action became an important symbol for the Civil Rights movement and an inspiration to those fighting to end segregation in America. Thirteen years later, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists while lowering their heads during their medal ceremony at the Mexico City Summer Olympics in 1968. That symbolic act jarred America and shoved the topic of racial prejudice into the face of millions of TV viewers. Their protests were an act of defiance against a system that still treated black Americans different than white Americans.

Forty-six years later, Barack Obama is president of the United States, Eric Holder is attorney general, and the CEOs of corporations like American Express, McDonald’s, and Xerox are African-Americans. Despite the remarkable progress made over the past generation, America's criminal justice system still treats black Americans worse than it treats white Americans. That is the reality in the streets, in courtrooms, and in prison. This tragic reality has been the excuse given by some for violent protests in Ferguson, Missouri and for other marches across America. And while this is a conversation worthy of heated debate, the spectacle that has unfolded on TV screens since August has poorly served those who want to remove the stench of discrimination from our criminal justice system.

The latest chapter in this made-for-cable-news cultural drama unfolded in a football stadium this weekend when five St. Louis Rams players held up their arms in an attempt to show solidarity with the growing "Hands up, don't shoot" movement that grew out of the Michael Brown case. The same gesture was made by members of the U.S. House this week. That is a shame. Actually, it is offensive because the gesture suggests that a police officer pointed a gun and shot a black man whose arms were in the air while he said "hands up, don't shoot."

The fact is that there is no credible evidence that remotely supports the absurd claim that ever happened. But then again, protesters also falsely claimed that Officer Darren Wilson stood over Michael Brown while shooting bullets into his dying body. And, of course, Brown's friend who accompanied him during the convenience store robbery also claimed that Michael Brown was shot in the back.

That, too, was a lie. But I guess that is irrelevant in a social media and cable news culture that promotes partisanship and controversy to improve their bottom line. And apparently it matters even less to protesters whose goal it is to drive the false narrative that white cops are patrolling neighborhoods hoping to find a young, defenseless black man to shoot in the back. "Hands up, don't shoot" is a lie that divides and makes President Obama's stated goal of bringing together police officers and communities more difficult. But there is greater damage that is being done. By basing this movement on a lie, those claiming to promote the cause of social justice are actually offending those they should be converting, and they are obscuring the ugly fact that the criminal justice system still discriminates against black Americans 60 years after Rosa Parks changed the world by refusing to give in to injustice.

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Napoleon said, "if you start to take Vienna, take Vienna." The Austrian capital seems to be the one place east of Paris where we haven’t sent troops over the past decade.

But we are now ensnarled in a war in Syria and Iraq, facing off against the most radical form of Islamic extremism. And when America's at war, there is no substitute for victory.

How should winning be defined against ISIL? Like it was in World War II--the forces of evil, yes evil, must be crushed.

And yet today, ISIL is on the march. Today, the beheadings continue. Today, towns and cities continue to fall. And still today, this evil virus keeps spreading.

Like most Americans, I have supported the president's steady approach to this war. But now that we’re there, it's time for the commander-in-chief to tear a page out of General Colin Powell's handbook. As the former secretary of state and Joint Chiefs chairman liked to say, "when America goes to war, we don't want a fair fight."

For the president, that means our military commanders should be allowed to throw everything they have at the enemy so our troops can kill and capture their leaders, destroy their war-making machine, and bring our sons and daughters home as fast as possible. Unfortunately, that's not happening in Iraq and Syria.

Handwringing against ISIL is not an option. Our weakness is radical Islam’s strength. We are at war. And it's time we start acting like it. If we’re going to take Vienna, then we better take Vienna. And if President Obama says he's going to order the military to degrade and destroy ISIL, then he needs to get to it fast.

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There was tragic news out of Moore, Oklahoma, on Friday afternoon when 54-year-old wife, mother and grandmother Colleen Hufford was attacked and beheaded by a former co-worker who had spent the past weeks trying to convert fellow employees to Islam.

Local news outlets reported he was shouting Muslim phrases during the attack so the feds were called in to investigate.

Their response, according to the Washington Post: There was also no indication that Alton Nolen was copying the beheadings of journalists in Syria by the Islamic State, the officials said, adding that they are treating this as an incident of "workplace violence."

Really? Despite the fact that the attacker's Facebook page had pictures of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, a gruesome beheading by ISIL, pictures celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers, and the promise that America would go up in flames, and also his declaration that "Islamic terrorists behead their victims' because of a 'precedent bestowed by their Prophet."

No indication that Nolen was copying ISIL? No religious motivation? How stupid does the FBI think we are? Who exactly are they afraid of offending? ISIL?

And is political correctness now so pervasive throughout our government that the FBI can't tell Americans the truth about the beheading of a grandmother in middle America out of fear of offending Muslims?

If the FBI weakly resorts to political correctness after a beheading on U.S. soil, can they really confront the evil America now faces and the threat of copycat killers?

The answer is no.

Opinion: How stupid does the FBI think we are?

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When I was growing up, my dad coached most teams my brother and I played on. And he was pretty great at what he did. Winning more championships than I could remember. I asked him when I coached high school football between college and law school what his secret was. He told me he never worried about filling positions. He said find talented kids who wanted to learn, inspire them, and the positions would fill themselves.

This week Eric Schmidt told us that was his strategy at Google as well. Find good people -- and the projects and positions would take care of themselves.

What applies to football and corporate culture applies to nation building as well. After trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of deaths, including thousands of American deaths, we find ourselves on the other side of epic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? Because instead of Jefferson and Madison, we found out that Americans' sons and daughters fought and died for Karzai and Maliki.

This is a tragic, teachable moment. Today, the United States finds itself in another Mideast war with no heroes on the ground. Just an ugly choice between Assad and ISIS. Any politician or diplomat who assures you there is a clean third way in Syria is lying. Does that mean we bury our heads in the sand and ignore terrorists who seek to destroy American cities? No.

But it does mean we move into this tragedy with eyes wide open and with the high level of caution this conflict requires -- and that the president is giving.

Janay Rice used an Instagram post to blame the media for “taking something away from a man who has worked his ass off his entire life.”

Rice’s abused wife continued:

“If your intentions were to hurt us, embarrass us, make us feel alone, take all our happiness away, you have succeeded on so many levels.”

Domestic abuse experts say that victims often defend their abusers. Maybe that’s why Janay Rice doesn’t understand that Ray Rice is the only person to blame for his firing from the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens.

The Rice family’s predicament is not the media’s fault. It’s not an outraged public’s fault. It’s not Janay Rice’s fault — even if she and the Ravens bizarrely apologized for her actions on the night she was brutally assaulted. The fault lies instead with a trained gladiator who punched a defenseless woman so hard in her face that she could have died — as well as a football league and feckless prosecutor who turned a blind eye to the vicious attack.

This tragedy is excruciating for the Rice family, and I’m sure Janay Rice will now endure even more hardship because of her husband’s suspension. But the Rice story is not simply about one woman or one incident of domestic violence. It is, instead, an issue that impacts women across America every day who deserve better than what they have been given by the NFL. One day, Janay Rice may learn that she, too, deserves better than what she got from her abusive husband.

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I have been a consistent critic of President Obama's policy initiatives. I called the stimulus package a steaming pile of garbage, said his health care plan was bad for America, and said his massive spending programs would undermine American capitalism.

I repeatedly warned against tripling the number of troops in Afghanistan, I condemned the administration's expansive drone policy, and have always had concerns about a management style that leaves the president isolated in D.C. and inside his own White House.

But when it comes down to facing down the greatest threat since 9/11, I think this president has it just about right. Let Republicans and neocons like Hillary Clinton play the cynical game that politicians love to play by second guessing his lack of action in Syria and speculating about what might have been.

Let's not argue over counter realities and instead stick to the reality that confronted the White House and Congress. Neither Democrats nor Republicans would have supported a third war against a Muslim country in less than a decade even if Barack Obama wanted to launch a full-scale invasion into Syria. And as Dwight Eisenhower taught us during the Suez Crisis in 1956, less is usually more when it comes to military operations in the Middle East.

Because the president refused to rush in with guns blazing in the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant crisis, when he goes before the American people on Wednesday, Mr. Obama will talk about launching a military operation that has the support of the Arab League, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and most of the Arab world.

And for first time in a long time, United States troops will be entering a battle against an evil force in the Middle East with the support of most Arab leaders.